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Yeah… Somehow I managed to not write the final status update until now 😀

I will give you a summary of my weekend instead.

I joined the Jam 24 hours late due to some real life (well, university) work. The original plan was to work through the weekend, but when seeing the theme “Tiny World” I was in love and just had to hurry up to be able to join.

To get a overview I did a short sketch on the whiteboard . It was a “planet” – a circle with a house on the side and a tree on the top. I decided to skip over to coding. My motivation obviously came from “building a planet”. Making a game was really secondary on this jam, my interest was art-, style- and tech-related.

After posting an on this blog I started modelling a simple planet. Then I wrote the first version of the force field and added greyscale shading (greyscale because I had no motivation to teach my obj-loader to import materials).

The state at the end of the day:

The next day I fixed the loading of colors and almost instantly went back to greyscale because it looked like a plastic world (though fixing payed in the end when I had to emphasize the gameplay-relevant items). I still had about twelve hours to go. Time to implement shadow mapping! The light shining through the planet was really annoying and I already wanted to play with it for some months.

8 hours before the deadline Nick (@urahziel) visited to look at my progress and decided to join me. A three hour break later (last chance to make a break :D) we returned to work, this time with a game design idea (credits to Nick) and the motivation to implement it – knowing that I would get a model from a skilled modeler really gave me a push. Though I still had to finish the shadow mapping first. I just had to do it 😀

The story ends with last-hour-gameplay-implementation and last-minute balancing. So last-minute I actually forgot to fix the game name on the title screen from “Tiny World” to “Planet Gravity” (though I silently fixed the download before anyone could notice :>).

What to take for the next ludum dare? I had no idea what to expect from this jam. If I had known how good the perception of the game would be (based on the current comments) and I would definitely have saved some of the long breaks and taken this project more seriously from the beginning.

I will definitly keep the nine hours of sleep on the last night. Being wide awake during the final stressful hours was super-helpful and I can absolutely recommend it.

The capsule (which hopefully will be replaced with a player model later) can walk- and jump around the tiny world. Fixing the camera and orienting the capsule towards the gravity took more hours than expected…

Physics support for climbing on the house (and other arbitrary geometry) as well as pushing boxes around.

Basic shading, as it can be seen in the screenshot. Figured out far too late that my actual lighting-code was actually correct but I had generated inverted surface normals (and a far too low specular exponent to conceal the fact).

I am pretty happy with the result. Hey, I can walk around on a planet!

Next up:

Colors? No motivation to fix the importer, but random colors don’t seem to fit…

It still needs some kind of gameplay. I’m in the “I have some vague ideas”-stage 😀